Women—Writing—Warfare: Literary Negotiations of Conflict around 1800

Abstract

Women—Writing—Warfare: Literary Negotiations of Conflict around 1800 Julie Koser Stephanie M. Hilger, Gender and Genre: German Women Write the French Revolution (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2015). Pp. 183183. $70.00. Wendy C. Nielsen, Women Warriors in Romantic Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013). Pp. 195. $80.00. In the field of German studies, the subject of women and warfare around 1800 has captivated scholars since the 1980s, beginning with the seminal research of Inge Stephan and others. In the last decade, the topic of women as warriors has received renewed scholarly attention in such works as Elisabeth Krimmer’s In [End Page 91] the Company of Men: Cross-Dressed Women around 1800 (2004); Patricia Anne Simpson’s The Erotics of War in German Romanticism (2007); contributions to the volume Women and Death 2: Warlike Women in the German Literary and Cultural Imagination since 1500, edited by Sarah Colvin and Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (2009); and Watanabe-O’Kelly’s Beauty or Beast? The Woman Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present (2010). Building on this body of research, Stephanie M. Hilger and Wendy C. Nielsen—aided by their backgrounds in comparative studies and their interdisciplinary approaches to women, writing, and warfare—add greater contour to existing scholarship, resulting in new and productive approaches to the topic. Both authors focus on the nexus of gender and genre, place concerted emphasis on women as writers, interrogate women writers’ strategic literary interventions in the public realm of politics, and read the woman warrior of German literature within the broader European political and cultural contexts. While Hilger confines her analyses to works by German women writers, Nielsen expands the scope of her study by placing the German woman warrior in dialogue with her counterparts in works by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French and British authors of both sexes. Taking the works of German-speaking women writers, from prolific authors such as Sophie la Roche and Therese Huber to the lesser-known Swiss widow Regula Engel, Hilger organizes her critical intervention in issues of women, writing, and warfare in the decades surrounding the French Revolution around six distinct genres: domestic and historical fiction, historical tragedy, autobiography, encyclopedic entries, and the bildungsroman (6). Of central concern in Gender and Genre are the ways in which German women writers appropriated and strategically deployed established modes of writing as mediums for women’s participation in the political and ideological discourses (from which they were “formally” excluded) about the social and political upheaval engendered by the Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars and Wars of Liberation. Anchoring Hilger’s analysis of German women writers’ occupation with the French Revolution are the tropes of the woman warrior and the woman emigrant. These figures, she argues, not only embody German-speaking society’s multifaceted responses to and negotiation with the decades-long culture of war and unrest but also expose the tension between women’s fictional and actual positions in the “political and literary sphere” around 1800 (158). New in Hilger’s examination of these literary works and their female protagonists is her identification of the “orphaned female protagonist” (8), who is liberated from familial bonds and traditional roles as mother, wife, and daughter in order to engage unfettered in the public sphere of revolutionary politics and to explore utopian fantasies of the New World. Hilger productively employs Lynn Hunt’s concept of the French Revolution as a “family romance” in her interrogation of the woman warrior in chapters one through four. Susanne Zantop’s groundbreaking work on “colonial fantasies” guides Hilger’s assessment of the woman emigrant in the New World in the concluding two chapters. Emerging from Hilger’s innovative study is the conclusion that fictional renderings of the woman warrior in Therese Huber’s Die Familie Seldorf (1795/96), Caroline de la Motte Fouqué’s Das Heldenmädchen aus der Vendée (1815), Christine Westphalen’s Charlotte Corday (1804), and Regula Engel’s Lebensbeschreibung (1821) not only pose a challenge to patriarchal structures of power; more importantly, they also “highlight the clash between the metaphorical representation of the body politic as a woman and the precarious situation of real women...